Dream in Fear
by Skulexander
Summary: Guess who's back?


A perfect day. The sky was half overcast with light clouds. It was sunny, and raining. The rain was warm. It felt nice. Birds were singing, and children could be heard playing not far away.

A perfect day, but not because of the pleasant weather. It was because Albert was going home after being overseas for what seemed like forever. In fact, he'd just gotten off the bus, and was making his way down the street. Albert was the name his father had given him, because his father was a mathematics professor at a prominent university, and Albert Einstein was one of his idols.

Albert's father didn't have much of an impact on his life. Other people often expected him to live up to his father's level of intelligence, but his father never cared, and neither did he. He never did well in school. He was more of a laborer from day one. At a young age he decided he was going to join the military one day, and eventually he did. Not, however, before he hooked up with his high school crush, only to later break up. It was only when he had gotten into the military that she found out she was pregnant with their baby.

The two of them decided to get back together, and try to make things work, to make a stable family for the child. Albert had planned to use his military money to get an residential wiring degree, but now was going to use it to support his family. He could always go to school later, after all. Right now, he was walking down the street, toward home. Wait..

How long had he been walking? Shouldn't he have made it there by now? The clouds, too, had completely overcast the sky, and the rain had picked up quite a bit. It was pouring down in droves now. It had gotten cold, too. Those kids he'd heard playing before, he now heard shouting as they rushed to get inside. He could also hear a dog barking.

This neighborhood, too. Was it actually his neighborhood? He'd thought it was. It looked like it was, but it also looked like it wasn't, and it didn't seem to end. What was happening? In fact, he didn't even remember ever leaving the military. He only remembered arriving, and walking. He looked to his right, to see a huge, imposing forest. Had that been there before? He peered through the sheets of rain into the trees. It was hard to see, but for a moment, he thought he saw a shape disappear behind a tree.

He continued walking. He heard a twig snap, and jerked his head toward the forest to see what it was, but saw nothing. He walked faster, and his heart started to pound heavily. He started invisioning a bear hunting him down. The menacing beast was staring him down, invisible to him, following him, waiting to pounce. Silly as it was, his greatest fear was bears. When he was 14, and had gone camping with friends, he got separated from them, and got attacked by a bear. He barely survived, and since then, has been terrified of the beasts.

He heard more twigs snap. Whatever it was, it was getting closer. Wait. The other side of the road was forest now too. When did that happen? It was also raining harder, and it was dark. The sky would light up, though, now and then when lightning struck. Thunder shook the earth, but it was not nearly as menacing as the snapping twigs. What unseen horror was hunting him? It had to be a bear. Oh god. It was getting closer.

It was really dark now. He couldn't see a thing. The rain had died down. It was now only drizzling. Thunder could still be heard in the far off distance. The snapping twigs, too, had stopped. That, however, only made him more uneasy.

The uneasiness must have been unwarranted, though. The sun was almost coming up over the horizon. It was that moment before dawn, when everything's blue. He could see houses in the distance, far past the trees. Right now he didn't care about getting home. He just wanted to get out of this forest, and away from the bear.

He heard thunder again. No, wait. It wasn't thunder. It sounded more like an animal roaring, and it was close. It was really close. It was right behind him. He felt a heavy force hit him in the back of the head, and the world spun out of control. As he came back to his senses, he heard a low, echoing laughter. When he regained his composure, he looked up to see what he'd dreaded seeing. It was a bear. No. No it wasn't. It was a bear, but the face was all wrong.

The face was human. A human face, but with horribly scarred up skin, as if it had been burnt long ago. The face was smiling, and that smile sent chills down his spine. "Here's Freddy!" it exclaimed. "I can BEAR-ly contain my excitement. It's not everyday you come back from the dead, after all! Now, hold still, so as not to make this any more un-BEAR-able than it already is!"

The man-bear lifted its huge arm up. It was all wrong. The claws looked more like knives than claws. Then the man-bear-Freddy, I guess-swung its arm at Albert, and Albert screamed as its knife-claws dug into his flesh. Then it brought its arm back and swung again, and again, and again, tearing flesh from bone, and mangling poor Albert until he was nothing more than a pile of bloody flesh.

The world warped and changed. Now it was endless blackness, with nothing in sight but a boiler. The man-bear Freddy was no longer a man-bear, but a man. He sitll had the horribly scarred flesh, and he also wore a red- and green-striped sweater, a brown fedora, and a special glove with knife blades attached to the ends of the fingers.

Freddy opened the boiler door, then picked up the body of Albert, and threw it in. Screams echoed out of the boiler, as if Albert were alive, but he wasn't. Then a green mist flew out of the boiler and into Freddy's mouth. He tensed up at first, then relaxed and moaned in pleasure. "One down, everyone else to go!" he exclaimed.

Newspaper headline: "Body of Soldier Found Horribly Mangled in Bunk; Reason Still Unkown"


End file.
